Watch for meteorites, Southland
If B movies have taught us anything, it’s that you don’t want to peer into a piece of meteorite.
As science-fiction stories galore attest, there’s a remote chance you might wind up becoming a superhero.
However, it’s much more likely that something alien will spring out at you, attach to your face, take over your body and then have a crack at global domination.
Should that happen in New Zealand in the coming weeks, Steve Wyn-Harris admits he will have some explaining to do.
He is a representative of Fireballs Aotearoa, an association of scientific meteorite enthusiasts that has launched a hunt to find what would be the 10th confirmed meteorite to have been identified in New Zealand.
It could have landed yonks ago. About four meteorites land in this country during an average year, and since Southlanders had been working the land for more than 150 years, Wyn-Harris likes the odds that some of us have come across one.
“Whether they’ve picked them up and put them on the front step is another matter,’’ he said, “but I’d be surprised if at least some haven’t.’’
Fireballs Aotearoa is encouraging people to look around for meteorite fragments that might be “holding the door open, or on mantelpieces – the stone that grandpa claimed was meteorite, or that out-of-place rock still sitting in the paddock’’.
People who believed they might have one were encouraged to email the association at meteorites@rasnz.org.nz. Scientists would sort through the submissions and follow up the most promising ones.
The most instructive discoveries for scientific purposes would be those that had fallen most recently and had not been weathered on Earth.
In that respect, the hunt has already taken a gratifying turn after a large fireball was seen above Otago and Canterbury on March 13.
The association has calculated that a 0.5kg rock landed in an area in the Mackenzie Country, and a more precise search area has been identified but not publicly announced.
The public has been invited to join the geologists and association members in the search today by meeting behind the Tekapo Restaurant and Bar on Motuariki Lane at 8am.
The meteorite should have a distinctive look – blackened with a glassy fusion crust.